


it won't be nothing

by meritmut



Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, Les Misérables (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-20
Updated: 2013-05-20
Packaged: 2017-12-12 10:42:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/810672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meritmut/pseuds/meritmut
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em></em>
  <br/>
  <span class="small">“Even if it means oblivion, friends, I’ll welcome it, because it won’t be nothing. We’ll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves; we’ll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze; we’ll be glittering in the dew under the stars and the moon out there in the physical world, which is our true home and always was.”</span>
  <br/>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	it won't be nothing

i.

Their worlds aren’t so far apart, really: they could’ve crossed paths a thousand times and never known it.

And why would they know it? He’s a university boy: solemn in his black robe and thoughtful in his wire-rimmed spectacles, he was raised among scholars. He has never left the cloistered spaces of the campus and loves it for its familiarity - the trimmed lawns of the quadrangles, the vaulting libraries and echoing halls…it’s home to him, and he suits it, being above all things tireless in his pursuit of higher learning (talk to him of the Magisterium and its power plays and your evening’s discourse is well and truly set).

He laughs readily and wins friends easily but his conduct is above reproach: he would no more readily break a regulation than his own little finger (and the nails on those fingers are always neatly-cut, never a snag to catch on ancient pages pored over by naphtha-light). His dæmon favours the form of a greenfinch, she is an entirely elegant creature, well-mannered and rather shy unless she finds you wanting - or pleasing - in which case she can be either objectionable or delightful. In Combeferre’s heart she alone counts herself more beloved than the libraries of the old college - he’d dwell forever in their stacks if it were allowed; he is a young man of a singular and insatiable lust for the mysteries preserved within their hallowed chambers.

In short he’s a model student, the kind of person you know just by _looking_ comes from good stock.

-

His best friend is rather a different sort, though no less a child of the red brick and marble. An only child; a first son, great things are expected of him but his friends will tell you that those things won’t be what he’s remembered for. He is the kind of young man for whom the phrase “to go down in a blaze of glory” might have been invented. 

He follows the rules insofar as they never catch him breaking them; he has the devil’s luck and Casanova’s charm - though Combeferre’s never seen him look twice at a woman in all the years they’ve been closer than brothers. Perhaps it’s the upbringing they’ve had, that they see so few of the fairer sex; perhaps he has yet to meet the one that will finally draw his gaze or perhaps he’s simply not made that way. Perhaps it just doesn't matter to him.

And despite having little to no caution or self-preservation instinct, Enjolras’ more subversive activities seem to go undetected.

Born to good fortune, good looks, and entirely too little good sense, Combeferre could only describe his best friend as blessed.

-

She, on the other hand, is a slang-spouting, sharp-elbowed street rat from the other side of the walls - and the college doesn’t look all that impressive from where she stands. 

The bricks on her side of the walls are stained in a frightfully dull spectrum of grey and yellow lichens, made perilous by clinging mosses and worn down by decades of quick and clever feet where the townies scamper up to peer over into the courtyard, and in summertime pelt bad apples down at the squealing scholars’ kids. When she was younger she had her own band of merry urchins (her brother keeps them in check now) and every day she’d lead them past those walls, the narrow alleys between the school’s boundary and the nearest houses providing short cuts to the river. She never saw him, though.

Her parents were once innkeepers - now no one’s quite sure what they do but Éponine, their eldest, is such a natural swimmer that the gyptians like to joke she’s one of their own. She’s dark and wicked-eyed enough, maybe her mother found herself a lad on a lonely night? Her father takes less kindly to those whispers but Éponine finds a kind of kinship with the boys from the boats, prefers their company to her parents’ half the time.

When she’s with the gyptian kids she tends to neglect her haunts around the college, but some nights she still likes to hoist herself up over the wall and onto the rooftop where the arrangement of the boys’ dormitories brings the building almost flush with the wall, where she’ll lie until dawn humming fragments of songs, soft lullabies that she heard drifting up into the close summer air from the boats as she wandered along the riverbank…

On one such night do their paths finally intersect.

-

She’s flat atop a gable and singing a sad melody to the sky, brown fingers weaving through the deepening twilight as if she were picking notes from invisible harpstrings (how she longs for a harp, a drum or a fiddle, any instrument to call her own. Montparnasse had given her a tin whistle for a birthday one year but it had disappeared and she suspects her father sold it).

Occasionally a bat will skitter past her head and her dæmon will dive playfully for it - dip and swoop and arc up in a glimmer of iridescent feathers, the paler patch of his belly flashing gold in the last embers of the dying day - but for the most part she is alone.

Until, from far below, she hears another voice pick up her tune and carry it on.

Whoever it is sings well and Éponine swings herself around that she might peek over the edge, to find out which intrepid student has broken curfew to give her a descant.

She catches a glimpse of sandy hair before a surge of triumph from that mind connected so inseparably to hers informs her that her dæmon as made a catch.

-

He hadn’t meant to be out this late, but on his way to bed from a late meeting with the senior archivist Combeferre had caught the briefest snatch of a song, rippling through the inky gloaming outside the open window. Before he knew it he was following the sweet melody, enraptured by the way the voice took off and soared on the higher notes as if it was in itself an instrument, played by a maestro’s hands.

He’s in the choir: he can sing too. It’s only now that he does so willingly.

He’s following the arc of the outer wall and he knows if he’s caught there’ll be repercussions, but of late he’s finding the rules of the school rather stifling, and - what’s it that Enjolras has begun to say?

_To suffer curfew is to suffer tyranny._

Fundamentally it may be no more than an argument against bedtime, but it’s eloquently-put and Combeferre can appreciate it now when the day’s warmth lingers and the honeysuckle scent of the gardens hangs heavy in the air, and high above a songstress weaves her spells about the world…

Movement up above and not so far ahead - can it be she?

Perhaps it’s one of the scullery girls. Perhaps he’ll know her.

He’s about to call out when something grips his chest like bands of iron, and the air leaves his lungs in a choked gasp.

Combeferre flings out an arm to clutch at the nearest support - the old brick wall isn’t so well-maintained here, slick and damp with rain-sodden lichens - sagging against it until the white lights speckling his vision dance themselves into nothing. Robbed of coherency and barely able to breathe through the heaving nausea within him, one thought makes it through the overwhelming sensation in his mind that _something is very very wrong_. One thought, one truth and one alone.

Someone has laid hands on her, where his alone are permitted.

_Someone is touching his dæmon._

And it’s as if hard fingers have found their way between his ribs to tug at the strings of his heart. Bile rises in his throat and vomit stirs his gut but he chokes it down - he’s running now, feet pounding along the high-walled sliver of space between building and wall because there amongst the discomfort and the sick feeling in his stomach there’s pain again: real pain.

She isn’t just in the wrong hands.

She’s hurt.

-

It takes all of half a second (the half-second between the injured bird tumbling out of her dæmon’s claws and into her own palms and the stumbling arrival of a boy on the street below, to be precise) for Éponine to realise that the greenfinch clutched in her hands is no true bird at all, and barely a heartbeat more for her to physically stop herself casting the creature aside.

Ignoring the instinctive protest that swells in every nerve and clamours through her brain, she leans in as close as she can to inspect the damage, murmuring words of comfort to the wretched thing.

“I won’t hurt you. I’m sorry,” she says, “keep still, though, or you’ll do yourself more damage. Where does it hurt?”

-

He’s heaving up his supper onto the paving stones when the girl slithers down from the wall and moves from the deepening shadows to stand hesitantly before him.

“You alright?” she asks, and he can hear in her voice that she knows how redundant her question is. He shakes his head.

“…you….touched her?” he manages, still overcome by disgust.

A shaky intake of breath. He lifts his head to see her nod. “Didn’t mean to. This knacker here-” and she gestures to the bird perched on her shoulder, looking about as shamefaced as a bird might “-was chasing bats and he mistook her. Dropped her right into my hands. I…I’m really sorry. Really.”

Combeferre draws himself up again, props himself against the wall and tries to act as if he doesn’t still feel the need to vomit. But the girl’s hands are empty and the uncompromising feeling of violated taboo no longer winds its fingers about his innards. Even he can see there’d be no point in it.

“Where is she?”

“Here,” says the stranger, shuffling forward to hold open the pocket of her skirt. Nestled inside, the finch looks up at him pitiably.

Combeferre scoops her out and checks her for injuries.

“She says she was just shocked,” the girl offers. “Don’t think there’s any real damage done.”

He shoots her a look - _that isn’t the point_ \- and she falls silent, dark skin flushing.

“Was that you?” he doesn’t look up from his inspection to ask it. “Singing, just now?

The girl shuffles on her feet as if embarrassed. “Oh…yeah. I like the roof. Quiet up there.”

“I like the gardens,” Combeferre isn’t sure what possesses him to respond that way, but when the nameless siren tilts her head and regards him with those lamp-oil eyes, wide and endless as a starless night, he finds he doesn’t regret it so much.

“Maybe I’ll come back one night, you can show me them,” she suggests with a hint of a smile curving her mouth. The bird on her shoulder shifts slightly, moving closing to her neck as if he were about to mutter something in her ear.

“Yes,” says Combeferre. His own dæmon mirrors the action (clearly it was no more than shock that afflicted her) and edges herself up onto his shoulder, eyeing the martin balefully.

Since she is only ever so reactionary around those she likes or disapproves of - she seems to take great issue with Bahorel’s mirthful companion, and when the two begin to bicker Enjolras’ dreams of a quiet meeting evaporate like wishes on the wind - Combeferre decides that it’s high time the resentful thing grew up a little.

“What do they call you?” he asks before the girl can slip away.

She turns half-back, tosses him a curious glance that’s half a glare, and finally lets the smile that had threatened to dispel her features’ anxiety before to unravel it completely, her mouth’s thin line breaking in quite a lovely grin.

There’s humour in her voice as she answers, and her response leaves Combeferre smiling too.

“My name, rich boy, but you can call me what you like until next time.”

ii.

Next time, as it transpires, isn’t for another three weeks, but she seems to seek him out more and more as the fading months of summer swing into the chillier autumn. He learns her name and more, though it still doesn’t feel like much compared to all she exacts from him about his own life. She likes to hear him talk, she says, of his friends in the college (he speaks of Enjolras a lot, and perhaps he chooses to ignore how she is soon perking up at the mere mention of his opinionated friend).

One night in early October, he’s putting the finishing touches on a report on the state of the philosophical archives for his favourite professor when that same song - the gyptians’ lullaby, lifted high and light on her faintly-rasping voice - floats in through his bedroom window.

Combeferre pulls back the curtain to find her perched right outside.

Being a prefect he shares a room with only two others: Joly, who’s dead to the world and so hardly a risk, and Enjolras. Not that he thinks Joly would tell. He’s a loyal friend, full of good cheer and health-related tips that some of the other boys find wearisome but Combeferre has often found rather helpful. Especially when it came to treating his dæmon’s shock…

And Enjolras? Enjolras had been dozing lightly, a sheaf of papers held loosely in his hands over his chest, but his eyes fly open when Combeferre opens the window and the volume of the strange song increases.

He sits up, running a hand through his fair curls and blinking sleep from his eyes, but Combeferre’s already halfway out the window.

A greatcoat envelopes her slender frame, far too long in the sleeves for her but warmer than the threadbare shawl he’s accustomed to seeing her in; her feet are clad in sturdier boots than the last time she’d come by, and the impossible tangles of her dark hair struggle free from a loose braid that hangs over one shoulder, flyaways poking out from under her cap.

“Fancy seeing you here,” he smiles as Éponine scoots back a ways to let him out (there’s no way she’s coming in, he’s not _that_ trusting and he doubts Enjolras would take kindly to it) and he sticks his legs over the sill so he can sit on it.

“Fancy is the word I was thinking of,” she grins, her eyes roving over the roof and down to the sprawling quadrangle the dorms overlook, “bigger’n any garden I ever saw.”

Combeferre nearly laughs at that description. Not many people use the quad for relaxing. Outdoor study, maybe. Rarely leisure.

“How’d you find my room?”

A shrug, careless. “Watched you. Wasn’t hard. Had time to spare this past fortnight or so, with the boats gone.”

“The boats?” He shifts slightly, feeling Enjolras’ dæmon approach his own on the sill beside him. If the girl notices, she ignores her.

“Gyptians. They left for the fair. Took the best of the summer with them.” For a moment she looks a little mournful and, curious, Combeferre indulges a long wish and dares to ask her where in the city she calls home.

She shoots him a look that manages to be disdainful, fond and inscrutable all at once.

“Told you once before, I’m sure,” she says. “The town’s my home. The streets an’ the canals, the parks and every house with an open door an’ a smile on the other side.” At Combeferre’s vaguely confused expression she sighs, reaching up to sweep the heavy fall of her hair behind one ear. “My family worked in the mill with a load of others, before the mill closed. Then they had an inn, but we look out for each other still. But I don’t s’pose you know much about work, do you?”

Part of him wants to protest that he could match any textile worker’s hours with the time he spends in study, but Combeferre suspects she’d cuff him round the head - and he also thinks he’d deserve it.

Something in the hollows of Éponine’s eye sockets and her cheeks, the slightly sallow tint to her skin (darker than his and probably a hundred times tougher, accustomed to wind and rain and hunger in a way he’ll never be) and the ferocious, challenging curiosity in her pitch-dark eyes, speaks of things Combeferre couldn’t understand if he tried, not yet.

They talk a lot, his new friend and he, but on her end little is actually said.

“I was lucky,” is all he can offer as an apology for his ignorance.

“Yeah,” agrees Éponine - he doesn’t know her last name, it would feel awkward to ask now - “you were. I know boys would kill to be here. But…” and here she frowns at him, “you never say what it is you do. Besides, y’know, school? Last time you said your mates get together and talk, that you’re against the Magisterium, but there’s got to be more…”

“Yes,” he says, “there is.”

-

Combeferre is not the student he was at the beginning of the year. Things are changing, the political climate is at its most unsteady and there are mutterings of the Church sinking its claws further into power. When he’s not extolling the need for the dissolution of the class barriers so evident in their collegiate city Enjolras likes to speak of (and here even he’ll turn to whispers) dismantling the Magisterium’s monopoly on science and art and faith, and liberating the lower orders kept “chained by the hegemony of the higher”.

When he first mentioned it to Éponine a few days ago he hadn’t expected her to find it particularly interesting, but the words had barely left his lips before the pitch-pools of her eyes were igniting and glinting with a dark fascination.

_“S’not just science and art and those things,” she had pointed out, seemingly slightly exasperated that he wouldn’t know it. “It’s smaller and bigger’n that all at once. The gyptians talk of it: say that the Magisterium have got the waterways under their control and they tack the levies up higher every year, make it harder and harder to live by sail. They say the Church’s got it in for them and anyone like them.”_

_“Like them?” echoed Combeferre gently, sensing a protective kind of bitterness in her tone._

_“Like us, all of us,” she had corrected herself. She let her hand fall to pick at a patch of greenish-yellow lichen, pulling it from the roof slate absently. “Not…” Not like you. Not your kind, safe with your walls and your funded libraries. Us with the streets and not much else._

Now Éponine wouldn’t call herself poor, exactly, and Combeferre wouldn’t call himself rich, but it’s been clear from the very beginning how different their worlds are. She can hear it in the naive hope that fills his voice when he tells her about the changes his friends want to effect: he seems a nice enough young man, all soft lines and gentle eyes, but the privilege into which he was born is as evident in the soft waves of his sandy hair as it is the comfortable-looking clothes he wears - though of course it goes beyond his attire. It’s in his very bones, the milk of plenty having nourished him all his life and made him strong and sure, so sure that right will overcome.

Still, even when he has no idea what he’s talking about he speaks well, and she could listen for hours. She has done, more than once.

-

She had gone away from that rendezvous and thought it over for a few days, because it would take more than a fleeting trust in a college boy for her to discuss gyptian matters so openly. In the end it was the way Combeferre’s lip had curled over _Church_ when he uttered the word that made her think her friends might have an ally here. 

So here she is, asking him again.

And _he_ has friends who think like he does, doesn’t he? He mentions them more than he talks about what they actually _do_ (a group of like-minded schoolboys don’t seem like much but those schoolboys will have the magisterial seats and the highest posts in the country one day. Isn’t that what university is for?). Friends like the tall boy who - drawn to their conversation by the irresistible direction it’s taken - joins them at the window now and stares openly at Éponine.

Combeferre falls silent: he’d forgotten to keep his voice low.

“And who might you be?” It’s quiet, but no less a demand for it.

At Éponine’s side her dæmon bristles. She lifts her head to meet his challenging gaze and her own becomes a touch more hostile in response. She doesn’t know this one’s name and he seems altogether harsher than her singer, but she’d be a poor kind of street rat if she quailed in fear of an ill-tempered schoolboy.

“Éponine,” she supplies, “and you, rich boy?”

His nostrils flare at that, and she calls it a victory.

(Combeferre doesn’t know it but she hasn’t just been watching him lately - she’s been listening too. She knows her way into the place and she knows where they walk most often, and she’s heard the hard-eyed one talk, leading the others in rousing debates as if for an instant they stood a chance at altering the world.

But the world is not within their walls, and they don’t even know it.

Still, though she scoffs at them she continues to listen, and she remembers what Combeferre said about their ringleader, so she knows how fiercely this golden-haired boy longs for change.)

“My name is Enjolras,” he replies stiffly, and Combeferre fears his friend might just slam the window closed on them both.

Then - 

“Won’t you come in?”

He extends a hand, and she stares at it only a moment before she takes it and lets Enjolras help her over the sill.

iii.

They argue _constantly_.

Combeferre has never known Enjolras to shy from a debate, but with Éponine it’s different. She embodies all the things he knows nothing about, and in her presence he is compelled to defend what he _does_ know.

But she has no compunction about tearing him apart, because in her words he’s an “over-groomed, inexperienced brat so lacking in sense that he doesn’t even realise you could fill all the libraries in their beloved university with what he doesn’t know about the world” and why should she waste her time trying to prove that? He proves it himself every time he talks over her.

For all the vitriol they spew at each other, Combeferre thinks they must rather enjoy it. There’s nothing keeping them here, after all, save pride.

When an especially vicious disagreement ends with Éponine pushing Enjolras into a snowdrift, Combeferre watches in astonishment as instead of storming off in a huff (as he absolutely would’ve done if it were Courfeyrac) his best friend simply reaches out, grabs her wrists and tugs her down into the snow with him.

She’s flat out on top of him with her hands braced on either side of his head, staring into his eyes as if she can’t believe he would do something like that, and Enjolras’ smirk fades as suddenly they’re far too close for it to end entirely well…

Which is exactly the point where she grabs a handful of snow and rubs it in his face.

-

“He’s _awful!”_ she cries one afternoon in February, dark-winged dæmon skittering about her head in agitation. Combeferre’s own is glaring at the little thing from her perch atop a lamp.

Éponine’s slouched over a chaise in one of the restricted rooms over the library, having snuck in to help Combeferre organise the shelves (though she’s yet to lift a finger toward that). ”He doesn’t listen to me. Just because I’m not one of his fancy scholars, because I don’t have a stick up my arse…”

“He’s as proud as you are, but he’ll come around,” Combeferre says soothingly, coming to sit beside her so she can lean her head on his shoulder. “He told me once he’s never met a girl like you.”

“And how many girls _has_ he met?” she asks sourly.

(Truthfully, Enjolras hadn’t said “a girl” - he’d muttered “anyone” - but something keeps Combeferre from mentioning that. He’s still not sure if it was a compliment and it wouldn’t do to set Éponine on the warpath again.)

“Few enough. But still. He spends more time arguing with you than anyone else. He likes you.”

A disbelieving snort. “Funny way of showing it.”

“I agree,” a voice from the doorway has them both jerking out of the chaise in shock, but they visibly relax as Enjolras crosses the room toward them, smiling faintly.

That is, until Éponine remembers she’s not _supposed_ to relax around him, and straightens her spine again to glare at him defiantly.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she demands.

“It means I have been remiss,” Enjolras explains smoothly, “forgive me, Éponine. It has been pointed out to me that I stand to gain more from listening than I do from talking.” He holds out his hands, palms open in a sign of apology and surrender, blue gaze sincere.

Éponine eyes him sceptically, but finally inclines her head in acceptance - and then she’s grinning. “Took you long enough.”

Enjolras’ stiff nod only makes her smile wider as he turns on his heel and stalks out again.

“God, that must’ve been _agony,”_ she observes once the door is closed again. Turning to Combeferre, she studies him with thoughtful eyes (he’s long since decided that they’re his favourite thing about her, along with her voice), chewing her lower lip before she gives another, softer smile.

“Thank you,” she says, and moves forward to sling her arms around his neck and hug him tight, “for whatever you said to him.”

“It was nothing,” Combeferre dismisses it, hugging her back. “I told you he’d come around.” 

iv.

They make their plans together. It’s been a long time since the boys lived in the university and whispers of war have begun to reach them in earnest. The explorers lead the charge - those grizzled men of the north and the frost-eyed women with hearts colder than the diamonds they drape themselves in - but the word spreads from the cities...

Enjolras speaks out and advocates reform: under the Magisterium they are regressing where they ought to be evolving, and the time has come for change.

Old friends now, Éponine still comes round and Enjolras keeps his promise to listen. He offers her the floor at their meetings but always she declines - she suspects he would make of her a symbol, the outspoken child of the streets emblematic of all that might be revolutionised in their society, if he could. If she let him. But she doesn’t feel emblematic of anything: she’s not a symbol, she is Éponine and half the time that’s challenge enough, thank you kindly.

She is no more or less than that, why would it not be enough?

Still, she feels a flush of pride when she hears him decry the way things are, and notices how little by little his impassioned speeches have come to embrace not only the rising need for the preservation of academia and scientific advancement in the face of the parochial institution that controls them, but also the need to remember those forgotten by the Church, or indeed actively threatened simply for being. Children go missing and the scholars mutter disapprovingly of experiments and blasphemies conducted under the flickering halo of the aurora - it’s more than an academic or political matter now and Enjolras has realised this at last.

Forces visible and intangible are aligning for a war that will shake the heavens, and he intends to stand at the forefront.

-

When Enjolras descends from the dais after their most successful meeting yet and stoops to press a chaste kiss to Éponine's hand, murmuring his gratitude to her so that only she and their dæmons can hear, Combeferre is perhaps the only one of the observers who isn't surprised when she responds by leaning in and throwing her arms around his neck.

And when Enjolras doesn't pull away, but wraps his arms around her waist and draws her closer...well, yes, alright, Combeferre definitely counts himself among the astonished party there (neither of his friends are what one might call 'huggers'...).

Not quite so amazed as when the pair of them join him later that night, as he sits alone under a guttering naphtha lamp writing out a new pamphlet, and a breathlessly elated Éponine flings herself at him and knocks the air from his lungs in an embrace so fierce his knees nearly buckle.

Over her shoulder, Enjolras is grinning.

Combeferre thinks he might be dreaming as they sit on either side of him, their dæmons indistinguishable from one another in the shadows, and she tells him she won't be leaving them after all, and her promise to stay and fight with them reaffirms what Combeferre's always suspected.

He's always loved them both, in ways different and alike, and war is coming. It would've been hard for this to end any other way.

v.

They go to war together.

In the end it’s Asriel’s war, but they never meet him and it doesn’t matter. The end comes just the same.

The fires of the battle bleed scarlet over the field as the Authority meets with the everlasting death; the shrieks and cries and thunderous wingbeats of His howling hosts stirring up such an almighty clamour as has never been heard in this or any universe.

The skies have become a wilderness, charcoal clouds rent into chasms and storms of light and sound and fury. _Is this revolution or carnage?_ Combeferre might ask, had he thought to spare for doubt amidst this chaos.

He falls to the angel blades, one arm reaching for the choking form of a witch not long for the world when the searing iron parts flesh and pierces him through.

He promises to wait, though no one hears, and when in the small hours of the final night Éponine emerges from the darkness of the under-world, just as she’d done that evening long ago with his dæmon safe in her pocket, he’s there to greet her; to hold out his hand and kiss her brow and tuck her under his arm, and she leans into him as they wait once more.

Enjolras lasts till the end but goes down - (how else?) - in a blaze of glory, an inferno that transcends the proverbial and passes into the mythic, consumed in a cacophony of irradiating light that rips out from the battalions of the Lord and flays him to the bone. They watch, the legions of angels, watch until his dæmon dissolves into a fading whisper of silvery Dust and his body gives up its last breath and the war goes on, because time stops for no one and he wouldn’t permit it even if he could.

They’re still waiting when he arrives, waiting with opens arms and soft smiles and the promise of hope: there on the edge of the morning, the fallen and the risen and the undying stand and watch the stars fade.

This new world will not be born without them. They will be a part of it, of each other and of everything that will ever be. And it is enough.

Dawn comes, and the three of them climb together into the light.


End file.
